Print limited by:
- Harder to share with audiences
- Dispersed slower than digital sources
- Difficult to quickly find specific details
- limitations on media that could be incorporated (ex: audio, video…)
- Different availability (^audience)
- Not interactive
- It can’t read what your eyes are looking at
- The finality of it, once it’s published if you want to re-publish it has to be altered
- Restrictive audience sample
- Price of admission
- Less able to make gestural indicators in a file
- Harder to store/easier to misplace
Some of these points were controversial. Digital media carries a price of admission too, often more so on the writer's end.
Modality of Print vs Digital
Is print's lack of "interactivity" always a bad thing? Is more interactivity (aka more modes) necessarily better? Talked about how the merit of interactive texts depends on immediacy.
- As a class we agreed that digital media tends to resolves the limitations of print texts
- key terms: immediacy, hypermediacy, remediation
- Immediacy- often called transparency, "looking through" a medium and only seeing the content, an immersive text. Immediate texts do not want us to see the mediation at work
- Hypermediacy- "looking at" media. If immediacy makes a text feel "natural" then
- hypermediacy makes it feel "unnatural" (but not always in a bad way)- used example of Instagram filters
- Current American culture prefers hypermediacy right now. Lots of browser tabs open on screen, email, Spotify, etc. Not immersed in any particular window.
- Remediation- Refashioning old media into new media; a shift from one medium to another. Painting led to photography, plays led to films, etc.
- Example of computer based solitaire. The software remediates a table and a card game. Has immediacy and hypermediacy. Hypermediacy exposed at game's end when cards explode, it's unnatural, runs counter to what happens in a physical game of solitaire
- New media has potential to remake old media. Examples: USA Today, computer graphics in films
- Is remediation different than assemblage? Yes, remediation deals with shifts in medium, not so much content
Class groups found examples of remediated texts, explained why we thought they were remediated. The Wells Fargo app example was controversial. Prompted discussion on how much change is necessary for something to be a remediation. Is an app a media shift from a website? Professor doesn't believe this is the case. Defined remediation as a shift in medium.
I've been thinking about this some, and part of this depends on how we define medium, app, and site.
ReplyDeleteHere's a definition of medium I find helpful: a social and technological method of composing, storing, and transmitting information
Based on that definition, we might think that a site and an app are different media. Sites and apps have a good deal in common: stored on servers, composed through code, transmit information through visual renderings on code.
But, if we keyed into the social aspects of media -- that is, how people use media, then, we get some differences. It seems to be that sites most frequently transmit information. There's usually some interactive elements: commenting features, uploading features, and maybe even editing features. But by in large, sites are about accessing, consuming, and manipulating information. I think you could make the case that apps attend to the physical more than the information. Meaning that apps care more about what you're doing with your device and your body. For example, apps frequently ask for you GPS location, track your location, and in the case of the Wells Fargo app, they digitize physical documents. So in my view, it seems like apps *could* count as a different media as long as they are different from sites in the ways that people use them.
Typo: "physical more than the informational"
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